Metro Transit driver allowed to avoid buses with gay-themed ads

A Metro Transit bus driver who objects on religious grounds is being allowed to abstain from driving buses that carry gay-themed ads.

Officials with the public transit system said they've made a reasonable accommodation to her beliefs.

But a union leader said the bus company is condoning intolerance, and that drivers were never before exempted from buses carrying other ads they found objectionable.

Issues of whether employees can refuse tasks that they feel violate their religious convictions has been gaining attention.

Many Muslim taxi drivers serving the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport refuse to accept passengers who are carrying alcohol. Some pharmacists across the country insist on the right to refuse to fill contraceptive prescriptions.

At Metro Transit, the issue is a billboard for Lavender, a local magazine aimed at the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community. The ad shows the face of a young man with the slogan, "Unleash Your Inner Gay." Fifty buses carry it periodically.

The Star Tribune obtained a memo to dispatchers at one garage in Minneapolis dated last Thursday that listed 25 buses operating out of that garage that carry the Lavender ad. The memo told managers not to assign them "under any circumstances" to the objecting driver, who was identified only by employee number.

"Our diversity office determined that we could make a simple, reasonable accommodation on religious ground by not assigning her (the driver) to one of the 25 buses -- out of 150 -- at the Nicollet garage," said Metro Transit spokesman Bob Gibbons.

Metro Transit has not tried to pull the ads, but Lavender CEO Stephen Rocheford said he was ready "to examine all our options" if the bus company did.

Gibbons said he's not worried granting this exemption will send Metro Transit down a slippery slope.

Any future requests would follow the same civil-rights law that was applied in this case, which says employers must accommodate an employee's religious beliefs unless it would cause "undue business hardship," he said.

But Michelle Sommers, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1005, fears the decision sets a bad precedent.

"Our union tries to represent all diversity -- whether it be religion, cultural, race, sexual orientation, any of that," Sommers said. "And if you start saying this or that ad is inappropriate, you're offending other people, and that can create a difficult environment for people to work in."

Driving a bus doesn't require endorsing the ads on it, she said.

"We have Muslim employees," Sommers said. "Now if there's an ad for alcohol on the side of a bus, should Muslim employees be allowed to not drive that bus? And is the next step that mechanics don't have to work on the bus?"

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